Computer Graphics

The Animated GIF format enables pictures to be shown with a variety of animated attributes, and small ones are often to be seen on the Internet, usually as a form of moving text. Their scope, however, is tremendous and limited only by the author/artist's imagination and the necessity for the action to be cyclic - i.e. the last frame of a cycle must mesh with the first frame so that the action is smooth and continuous.

Left: R'n'B Automata is a full-screen Animated
GIF drawn using Corel Xara v1.5 in just six frames, animating bit-image elements from Microsoft's "Musical Instruments" CD. Many layers were employed and the drumkit, which was added last, appears both in front and behind other elements.
(Animation has had to be disabled for this illustration because of the file size was rather too large for Web page use)

There are now several utilities available to help with their creation but I am familiar only with CorelXara v1.5, which makes the process so simple that I have no wish to look for anything else. Each animation frame is basically composed on a separate layer, since foregrounds, middle-grounds and backgrounds can be animated too, and the process of converting the animation to a suitable bit image is succinctly described files in a single page in CorelXara's Help files. I bought CorelXara in its original form as Xara Studio v1 and it has been my favourite piece of software of any kind and I have drawn many vector pictures with it and used it for DTP displays, often in conjunction with bit-images. Its on-CD help and demonstration files are unrivalled examples of clarity.
Right is a bit-image conversion of my CorelXara v1.5 drawing of a Robot Arm

The most famous package for improving or changing your scanned photographs has to be Adobe Photoshop, but the best value in this field is undoubtedly Paint Shop Pro by JASC. For non-professionals it has all the necessary features required not only to edit existing pictures, but to create Computer Art from scratch. Add Filters Unlimited for its huge array of effects and you have a really potent package. The latest version of Paint Shop Pro, v6, also has vector drawing functions and now even that bastion of PhotoShop, Digital Photo FX magazine, treats it with some respect.

There is a very helpful Paint Shop Pro newsgroup, comp.graphics.apps.paint-shop-pro, where competent artists are usually willing to share their experiences and expertise for the benefit of "newbies." It is interesting to note that many of the artists on that group use PhotoShop at work but relax at home with Paint Shop Pro.

Left: Pointing a camera upwards to include all of a building will cause the walls to converge. In this Retina IIIc photo, Paint Shop Pro has been used to correct for this. Perspective control lenses to do this can cost over £250 even secondhand so Paint Shop Pro can save money with this function alone.
Kodak Retina IIIc

Right: A plain white sky has been improved in this picture of The Old Bull Inn in Inkberrow (said to be the inspiration for the fictional 'Bull' in BBC Radio's longest running serial, "The Archers") with the aid of one of the Render Clouds filters of Paint Shop Pro.
Olympus OM-1n, 50mm f1.8 Zuiko

Left: This pub, opposite my doctor's surgery, was taken quite close to with a 28mm lens and the vertical lines of the walls converged dramatically until they were "corrected" within Paint Shop Pro.
It's a particularly straightforward function, activated by just three keystrokes - Ctrl-A, Ctrl-F and D (Select all, Float and Distort). Some of the upper floors' windows were selectively darkened too, as the sky's reflection in them reduced visible detail.xxxxxxxxxxxx Ricoh GR1

Right: This historic cruck-framed cottage in Station Road, Erdington has been restored (it was derelict five years ago),
but wouldn't you just know that Birmingham City Council would spoil the view of it by erecting one of their ugliest modern street lamp standards alongside it. Paint Shop Pro again to the rescue and it has been cloned out in this picture. I leave it to you to ascertain where it was.
The metal pole abandoned at the base of the building was
one of several in the foreground. The others were cloned out. Ricoh GR1

PaintShop Pro's Layers function

If you have a camera system with several lenses and/or bodies, and a flatbed scanner, you can scan each body, front downwards on the glass, and each lens, front element downwards, and load each scan into a separate layer but in the same picture file, on Paint Shop Pro 5.03 version or higher. Now delete the background to make it transparent, of each scanned item and line up each so that the centre of each scanned lens picture is over the centre of the camera body's (bodies') lens mount (using partial transparency helps with this).

By switching the visibility on and off of relevant layers, you can have a picture of any body "fitted" with any lens. I did this with my OM cameras and lenses and you can see some of the results on my OM SYSTEMS page - all three pictures of cameras pointing straight at you are from this same file.

TIP: Make a note of your scanner settings to ease the addition of a newly purchased lens or body to your existing PSP file. (I forgot to!)